Multicast traffic may be becoming increasingly important for many Internet applications, where an information provider (e.g. source) may deliver information to multiple recipients simultaneously in a single transmission. Some examples of multicast delivery may include video streaming, real-time internet television, teleconferencing, and/or video conferencing. Multicasting may achieve bandwidth efficiency by allowing a source to send a packet of multicast information in a network regardless of the number of recipients. The multicast data packet may be replicated as required by other network elements (e.g. routers) in the network to allow an arbitrary number of recipients to receive the multicast data packet. For example, the multicast data packet may be sent through a network over an acyclic distribution tree. As such, the multicast data packet may be transmitted once on each branch in the distribution tree until reaching a fork point (e.g. with multiple receiving branches) or a last hop (e.g. connecting to multiple recipients). Then, the network element at the fork point or the last hop may replicate the multicast data packet such that each receiving branch or each recipient may receive a copy of the multicast data packet.